“What if we go down?”
“Wow,” said Chuck, “what a question! First thing, I’d look for a clearing to set it down in. It’s uncharted territory: You’re out there on your own, out in the middle of nowhere, no two-way coms.” He shook his head—unthinkable.
Despite my worry, I had a lot of confidence in Chuck because I had learned of his feats of flying; at the age of eighteen, he had soloed across the Atlantic, one of the youngest pilots to do so. I hoped the aircraft’s deficiencies were mainly cosmetic. I told myself a world-class pilot like Chuck would never fly a plane that wasn’t safe.
I jammed myself behind the lidar box: no seat, my knees in my mouth. Juan Carlos was right in front of me. He was concerned about how I would fare; I sensed he was worried I might get airsick and vomit down the back of his neck. He asked if I’d had anything to eat or drink that morning. I said no. He casually mentioned how grueling it was out there, flying low and slow over the jungle for six hours straight, banking steeply turn after turn, tossed around by thermals, sometimes dodging vultures. The A/C on the plane was broken, he said; we would be sealed in a metal tube flying in full sun. The plane had no bathroom. If you had to go, you went in your pants. I tried to assure him I would be an exemplary passenger.
Elkins gave me a GoPro video camera and a still camera with a telephoto lens and asked me to take more pictures of the mysterious white pillars and anything else of interest I spied down below.
Chuck Gross climbed into the pilot’s seat and began running down the checklist, while Juan Carlos jacked his laptop into the lidar box. He showed me the flight plan he had programmed on his computer screen, dozens of parallel lines crisscrossing the valley, designed to maximize coverage while minimizing flight time. In addition to being a lidar engineer, Juan Carlos was also a licensed pilot, enabling him to work seamlessly with Chuck.
We took off from Roatán and were soon winging over the glittering Bay of Honduras, the mainland looming up ahead. It was a gorgeous day, the sky dotted with fluffy white cumulus. Far ahead, where the blue mountains of Mosquitia rose up, we could see the cloud cover was sparse and high. As we flew inland, the settlements along the coast gave way to scattered hamlets and agricultural fields alongside slow brown rivers. The land mounted into forested foothills, where hundreds of ragged patches of clear-cutting came into view. Plumes of smoke rose from the jungle in every direction.
The logging holes eventually disappeared and we were flying about four thousand feet over unbroken, precipitous forest. Chuck maneuvered his way through the mountains as we approached T1. An hour out of Roatán, Juan Carlos pointed out the rim of the valley in the distance, a wall of green mountains with a sharp notch in them. Chuck eased the plane to a lower altitude and we cleared the rim at a thousand feet, which gave a tremendous view of the landscape. As the land dropped away beyond the rim, I was struck by the valley’s picturesque topography, the ring of mountains embracing a gentle, rolling landscape divided by two rivers. It really did look like a tropical Shangri-la.
The plane leveled off at an altitude of about 2,500 feet above ground, and Juan Carlos booted up the lidar machine, picking up where they had left off the day before. As the lidar bombarded the canopy with laser pulses, Chuck steered the Cessna in parallel lines across the valley, each four to six miles long, in a pattern that, on the computer screen, looked like a gigantic weaving. The plane was buffeted by thermals, knocked up and down, back and forth, and sometimes sliding sideways in a gut-wrenching fashion. Juan Carlos had been right; it was a brutal and scary ride. But Gross worked the controls with constant finesse and a sure hand.
“We were rocking and rolling pretty good,” Gross said later. “It’s like flying a big spiderweb. It takes incredible skill. You have to fly the middle of the line, and you can’t go sixty feet on either side of that line. You have to slide that plane around, doing all rudders. To stay on the line, in that wind, that was challenging. And you have to hold the altitude and airspeed. I had to climb with the terrain and maintain the same altitude. If the terrain starts coming up, I have to come up with it.”
Through it all, I peered out the window, transfixed. I can scarcely find words to describe the opulence of the rainforest that unrolled below us. The tree crowns were packed together like puffballs, displaying every possible hue, tint, and shade of green. Chartreuse, emerald, lime, aquamarine, teal, bottle, glaucous, asparagus, olive, celadon, jade, malachite—mere words are inadequate to express the chromatic infinities. Here and there the canopy was disrupted by a treetop smothered in enormous purple blossoms. Along the central valley floor, the heavy jungle gave way to lush meadows. Two meandering streams glittered in the sunlight, where they joined before flowing out the notch.
We were flying above a primeval Eden, looking for a lost city using advanced technology to shoot billions of laser beams into a jungle that no human beings had entered for perhaps five hundred years: a twenty-first-century assault on an ancient mystery.
“It’s coming up,” Juan Carlos said. “Right there: two white things.”
In an open area, I could see the two features that he had photographed the previous day, standing about thirty feet apart next to a large, rectangular area of darker-colored vegetation. The plane made several passes as I photographed. Again, they looked to me like two square, white pillars rising above the brush.
We got through the flight without mishap, other than the moment a few hours into the flight when I turned off the lidar machine with my knee as I tried to shift my aching legs. The machine and the pilot’s navigational system were linked, so shutting off the lidar turned off Gross’s navigation. He immediately went into a tight, stomach-sickening holding pattern while Juan Carlos booted the machine back up and I apologized profusely. “No worries,” he said, far less perturbed than I thought he would be.